I know several people who are in arranged marriages, and while they are happy enough with the situation, all of them have very clearly said they will never do this to their children, so take from that what you will.

Introduction is common enough I’d say, but any expectation beyond maybe talking to them is not.

As for what most people do: it’s just going about life and meeting people. Join clubs, talk to people in your community, at work or school, friends of friends (or family friends, again introducing is common enough, anything beyond that isn’t), even bars works; anywhere really.

Just don’t go places to find a partner; go to places to meet people. From there meet the ones you like more often, make friends, and over time you’ll bump into people and find the right ones. This is one of those things that happens more the less you “try”. Be open to the idea, but let people get to know you as a friend first.

Agreed, I use AI for coding the way I used to use Stack Overflow:

Find me code examples, explain an error or give me some summaries of how something should work but then I go confirm that or test it separately!

I never trusted Stack Overflow for anything more than pointing me in the right direction for what to research. Documentation links, snippets, blogs etc, that sort of stuff. As long as I tell the AI to give me a reference, about 60-70% of the time I’ll get something I can actually use to confirm the code it gave me or get an answer for my question. At best what it does is save me googling time.

I mean, I’m pretty sure you can find uranium in all kinds of places.

Either way I get that it’s not in the spirit of the question, so I added a “real” answer too ;) The plan wouldn’t really change much whether there’s an inland desert or not too, though the island certainly should end up big enough to possibly have one.

The easy answer? Choose somewhere with uranium deposits, and bootstrap a nuclear program. 10 years should be enough given the 100% literacy rate implying a pretty robust education base already.

Other than that, a pop of 30M over 900000km2 is pretty low density for a country so I’d pick an island with a large internal barren desert and huddle people up in 3 or 4 isolated shelters and then force the enemy through a long tough and brutal desert attrition war until they give up or we die. And that’s after mining the ocean around the island and fortifying the coast.

That should make the effort of attacking vastly outweigh the benefits leading to a long term pyrrhic victory.

Assuming of course that I can’t build a strong enough military in those 10 years. 30M pop with high literacy rate and a pretty good cohesive culture (speaking the same language) should make militarising pretty easy too and propel us into a top 10 army on its own.

Funny lines!? I’ll have you know they were straight as an arrow!

/j